My first week of work at the vet school went great. I was thrown right into an experiment Monday and Tuesday that went all day, both days, and felt very productive. Granted, when you're first learning the research, it's pretty much "do whatever they tell you to" until you get the swing of things, so hopefully after reading lots of journal articles and doing more work I'll soon become a pro.
What was the experiment about? Basically, while my professor and her two students were away at Tours, they finished up the feeding trial they had been doing on their pigs, had them put down (sorry piggies...), and took all the samples they needed from various organs. This past week's work involved taking fresh intestinal tissue samples - the organ of interest for the effects of deoxynivalenol - and running various enzymatic tests on them, which is quite complex, involves lots of instruments and pipetting, and being veeeeery careful to not mess anything up out of the many samples taken. One of the such enzymes was myeloperoxidase, a lysosomal enzyme that is produced by neutrophils (a type of white blood cells) and, important to our study, is a marker of inflammation. So the test involved extraction of this enzyme, etc. etc. Overall, this is just one small morsel of a huge, very thorough study on this mycotoxin. The study involves in vivo (in the live animal) testing, in vitro (in cell/tissue cultures), and ex vivo (done on live tissue, but outside of the animal - in our case, using isolated intestinal loops of a single pig to run multiple simultaneous dosage tests) studies. The cool thing about this is that in doing all these experiments is that we're able to not only study the effects of deoxynivalenol itself, but also compare the effectiveness, advantages, and disadvantages of the various experimental methods mentioned above. The nice thing about the ex vivo part, which is still pretty new, is that it has more experimental potential than in vitro but still allows the use of fewer animals!
But I could go on about that for awhile. This week is off to a great start, too - my professor is so awesome, she insisted that if I was interested, I attend a three-day pathology conference/workshop at the vet school this week - free of charge! The head visiting lecturer is a DVM/PhD from Ohio State University who is an expert in embryological/developmental pathology in mice. This may sound boring to some, but it is actually very handy to understand and has a lot of human and veterinary applicability. Also awesomely, lunch every day is a catered, three-course meal, and since the attendees are all pathologists (some English, some French), it makes for some very cool conversation. Today's lunch was an awesome salad with a goat cheese-filled pastry, pork mignon (little pork medallions) with bacon-wrapped green beans and baked mashed potato swirlies, followed by an assorted cheese plate (I skipped the Roquefort), then nougat glacé (nougat ice cream! Yum!). Needless to say, I ate super well.
I also had an awesome weekend, but I'll get to that soon. After a mostly rainy week, the weather was incredibly perfect Southern France gorgeous. It involved buying my new bike (which I then rode home in the rain), going out with some friends and said bike Saturday night, then profiting from the gorgeous weather Sunday and exploring small-town France (a favorite pastime of mine!) with a friend. I'll get to that tomorrow, but for now, here's a sample photo!
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| Teaser photo of the lovely hilltop village Cordes-sur-ciel! |
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